This guy may be computer literate, but I think his literary skills stopped there.
FWIW I’m pretty much a bottom rung user in the computer world.
The Toshiba HD on my 5 yr old Dell laptop suddenly shot craps.
I bought a new drive on eBay for 50 bucks (4x bigger and much faster) and did a XP reinstall from scratch (had the original Dell CDs).
Took about 3 hours total - about an hour of that was looking for drivers that I didn’t have backed up and weren’t on the Dell reinstall CDs.
I tripled my RAM for another 20 bucks.
The thing runs great now, if I get another 5 yrs I’ll be happy as could be. :-)